


Aphelion

by psikeval



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-01
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-07 03:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4248339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps this is simply the next stage of Samara's life, a gathering of allies after centuries alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

 

“Hey.”

She’d expected Shepard, when the doors hissed open, but it is the human biotic called Jack, no further designation provided in the ship’s computer. Samara has never seen her before; sees her now in a distorted reflection superimposed against the void. The tattoos are dense, most of them entirely indecipherable. Tangled and beautiful.

“Greetings,” says Samara, in time with her next exhale of breath. She does not rise from meditation. Its place in her daily routine is invaluable, and not to be abandoned lightly. Should there be trouble, she will be at her most poised, and perfectly ready to strike.

Jack is tall for a human, or gaunt enough to seem so, her bones too prominent — a build that speaks of prolonged inactivity, perhaps even near-starvation. Samara knows of the prison ship called Purgatory, and rumors of its methods. Difficult, even for the justicar code, to determine who upon it most deserved to die. A personal distaste for indiscriminate slaughter led her to avoid it.

Seeing Jack now, the reasoning feels— inadequate. To say the least.

Unacceptable self-doubt, rooted in sentimentality. She draws it out ruthlessly to be examined and discarded. Any bias can be dangerous, when left to take root in the mind.

“What’s all this shit?” The inquiry is, by the nature of its figurative language, non-specific, and Samara must turn her head to look at the items in question.

“They are books.”

“Huh.”

It occurs to Samara, as she faces forward and breathes into the proper alignment, that her answer might be taken as sarcastic, a statement of what is obvious and, therefore, a slight upon Jack’s intelligence. “None of them are mine,” she clarifies calmly, practiced in speaking while still. “As a Justicar, I foreswore my possessions. I found them here, and have not read them.”

Jack scoffs and skirts the edges of the room, always tilting her weight as if edging along some unseen precipice. _Cagey_ —a human word, and crude, but fit to its purpose. She might brace herself for impact and withstand onslaughts that would break another, but a creature of flight is ever evasive, seeking its next escape.

She has heard of Jack, in the course of familiarizing herself with Shepard’s crew— knowing they were safe, no matter what she found. While bound to Shepard’s will, there will be no executions. For the first time in centuries, the code is not her primary directive. It is odd, not least because of how little she minds, how comfortable Samara finds this respite from searching and vigilance.

A single Asari week prior to this moment, she would have been bound to purge all criminal elements from the crew. And Jack is a criminal, without doubt. That mark on her chest, four skeletal hands — even distorted, it speaks to a crime Samara knows. Displayed that all might see, as few are brave or reckless enough to do.

Behind her, Jack shifts uncomfortably on her feet.

“Oh.” Samara inclines her head. “I apologize.”

It earns her only bristling shoulders and a dark-painted sneer. “For what?”

“It is in my nature to evaluate those I meet. One of the reasons I remain here. I thought my isolation might help make the crew more comfortable.”

Jack leans, arms crossed, against the bulkhead behind her. It casts her reflection’s face further into shadow.

“You’re fucking weird. Anyone ever told you that?”

An old and foreign feeling, this urge to smile. “You do not seem upset.”

“I don’t trust people who pretend they’re not watching me.”

“And if they truly aren’t?”

She scoffs and thumbs a line shaved into her hair, runs fingers down her scalp like claws. “Prison to prison to prison. They’re always watching.”

Her phrasing is paranoid, the sentiment less so. The tattoos, her powers, everything down to the way she moves; even to an untrained eye, it sets her apart from most of her species—and more than that, marks her as a danger. _Death_ across the knuckles of one hand. Certainly Samara would watch her closely, for more reasons than the code.

“So you just lock yourself up here ’cause you might make some asshole nervous? That’s bullshit.”

“It is also for my own comfort. I worked and traveled alone for centuries. The transition to living aboard the Normandy can be… disconcerting.”

 _Overwhelming_ , perhaps, would be the word best suited, but a justicar does not speak freely of weakness.

After a brief hesitation, Jack steps a little further her place by the door and takes a seat along the wall, feet planted firmly on the floor. Ready to rise at any moment, if she must. For the moment, however, her eyes meet Samara’s, reflected in the window, and she speaks.

“Don’t know how they stand the noise sometimes. Not even the ship, just _them_. All the lights and shit, and—” a thought, violently waved away, “anyway, it’s loud. I like the dark.”

Darkness, of course, does not preclude sound, but Samara chooses to sleep each night in full view of the black and silent void around them, a cradle of true emptiness, true peace. They are not so different, perhaps. “The stillness surrounds, and there is comfort in it.”

A twist of displeasure to Jack’s lips; she does not like to be surprised. “Yeah, I guess.”

“I only meant to say that I think we understand each other.”

“Whatever.” She rocks in place, just a little, even while sitting still.

Samara does not press the subject, nor is she foolish enough to ask why Jack has come here. Years ago she learned to recognize one from whom so much has already been taken that even answers to the simplest questions are jealously guarded. Regardless of Jack’s reasons, the company is… not unpleasant.

“EDI,” says Samara softly, never having understood the impulse to shout up at a ceiling when speaking to an artificial intelligence wired into every part of the ship. “Dim lights eighty percent.”

The change is granted, at the price of a flare of tension from Jack. “Shit. Don’t do me any favors.”

“It will ease my meditation.” This is true, though Samara typically practices discipline by centering herself in any environment; there is a comfort she rarely allows herself in easing away the sharpness of the Normandy’s typical lighting. Already her eyes feel more relaxed, her focus simpler. “Does it bother you?”

Jack’s slightly warped reflection only shrugs, glaring in the direction of the books. But she places her back to the wall and begins to calm, stillness spreading over them both, and the distant stars pass them by for hours before she rises again to leave.

 

\--


	2. Chapter 2

The next several cycles of the ship’s Earth-based chronometer pass in relative quiet. Shepard, Lawson, and Solus have gone to Ilium, and the Commander’s last communication indicated there may have been complications that will lengthen their stay. Approximately half the crew is currently taking leave on the planet within the permitted travel radius.

It means there are few people present when Samara takes her meal in the mess hall; it does not mean that she is able to eat wholly uninterrupted.

“Excuse me,” says Garrus. The ship’s Cerberus records indicate he has history with Turian military, C-Sec, the original Normandy, and time spent as a vigilante on Omega. Samara, who has seen enough over centuries to judge, considers it more a background split in two parts, the dividing line being when he became one of Shepard’s. “Mind if I join you?”

“No.” It is, at any rate, always better to be distracted from the particular taste of military rations. Garrus settles into the seat opposite hers without a meal; it occurs to Samara to wonder what he eats, as Cerberus seems unlikely to stock food incompatible with human physiology.

“Haven’t seen you around much since you came aboard.”

“No, you have not,” Samara agrees, curious as to whether he’s making a point, or simply small talk. Turians are not typically prone to the latter, but it is common enough on human ships.

“I didn’t want to intrude, if you’d rather not be bothered. But can I ask you some questions? About working as a justicar?”

“You may.” She lays down her utensil, wipes her fingers clean and folds the cloth neatly next to her tray. Without precisely meaning to, she straightens in her seat. “First, I would clarify that being a justicar is not considered work by the Asari, as most races think of it. A banker, a dancer, a diplomat — they may lay down the tools of their trade and be only themselves. The code does not allow for this. The devotion required is more similar to—”

“—a monk, yeah,” says Garrus, nodding. Then he winces, a brief downward twitch of his secondary mandibles. “Sorry. I got caught up.”

“Not at all. You are correct.”

“But… you aren’t being a justicar right now.”

“An oversimplification,” she tells him, too gently to be taken as criticism. “There are oaths of subsumation we may take, to be bound to the will of another. I have embraced the third such oath to follow Commander Shepard.”

“So for the last four hundred years… you could just walk into a place and start getting rid of the bad guys, without any rules or red tape? Aside from the code, I mean.”

There is something wisftul in the modulation of his voice—dangerously so. Garrus is far from the first she’s met to see the path of the justicar as a shortcut, to mistake a demanding and ruthless code for a punitive one. The desire to settle scores is not always anathema to the code, but neither does it prepare one to empty a village and deliver their weeping children to safety.

He is still, for all his scars and jaded stories, so very young.

“Sorry,” says Garrus, with a soft, bitter laugh. “Shepard always said I shouldn’t… anyway, I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. It’s just a fascinating system.”

Jack arrives knuckles-first, fist striking down on the table before she sits down next to Samara, every line of her body a challenge. “Yeah? Go be fascinated somewhere else.”

She’d noticed Jack standing behind her, around the time Garrus mentioned her non-adherence to the code, and had wondered when she might decide to step forward. Now there’s a silence, as if they’re waiting for Samara’s reaction, whatever they expect it might be, before Garrus shrugs his shoulders like a human. “I’ve got some calibrations to work on anyway.”

Jack watches him go, arms crossed, and doesn’t speak until the gunnery doors have closed behind him. “He bothering you?”

“No. His interest in my work is unusual, for a Turian, but it’s more flattering than troublesome.”

“Oh.” The corners of Jack’s mouth flatten, uncertain and none too pleased about it.

Samara makes an Asari gesture out of habit, fingers brushing the air toward Jack; _it is a worry not worth standing between us._ Somewhat to her own surprise, she also adds a smile. “I believe our conversation was nearly finished.”

Jack doesn’t meet her eyes for long. “You gonna eat that?”

She refers to something in the corner of Samara’s tray, cut into a perfect pale yellow prism and left untouched. In texture, it appears to be somewhere between a boiled vegetable and what humans call ‘bread.’ Samara had almost wondered if it might be a sponge provided for her to clean her tray after the meal. “Do you know what it is?” she asks now, curious.

“Food’s food,” Jack shrugs, snatching it up, and Samara eyes the sharp angle of her wrist as she bites off a corner. “It’s kind of sweet,” she says, having swallowed. “I’ve had worse.”

“Oh, high praise indeed,” says Gardner mockingly, from his place at the mess hall’s counter.

It’s somehow less alarming than it should be, watching the viciousness rise in Jack. The cause is clear, on a Cerberus vessel, and she wears her hate so easily, so openly. In the violent shift of her shoulder and the sudden, threatening curl of her hands. For all her years of evaluating risk, Samara senses none here; she finds she is only disappointed by the inevitable. The square of unidentifed food lands hard on her tray, making it rattle.

“Shove it up your ass,” Jack snarls at Gardner, and stalks out as quickly as she came.

Samara smiles faintly in her wake, considering a contrast that has become more apparent in the slow progression of her matron days. There are individuals, such as Garrus, who remind her what it was to be a mother—the desire to teach, to guide and protect. And there are some, like Jack, who remind her of other things entirely.

When she thinks of the patterns of ink on Jack’s arms and the dark red curve of her lips, the smooth human shape of her skull and the edge of fury laced through her every movement, Samara finds she doesn’t feel her age at all.


	3. Chapter 3

 

The lower deck is dimly lit to conserve fuel better spent on stealth; the engine room is lit by EDI when crewmembers require it. As for the hold below, it contains only the dull red glow of machinery. This is the first time Samara has seen it, stepping softly down the stairs, careful to strike her boots down on the metal so that one might hear it over the hum of engineering.

It would not do, she strongly suspects, to take Jack by surprise.

Both cargo holds were dark when she passed, and when Samara reaches the bottom of the stairwell she can see why; Grunt is sitting on the floor by Jack’s makeshift cot, passing back a large bottle of what humans inexplicably call Asari moonshine (the word is actually _iralai_ , pale fermented grain). Shepard must have picked it up on Ilium.

Grunt stops for a moment, glancing between the two of them, but when Jack lifts her chin toward Samara in greeting he seems to take it as permission of sorts, and continues. He is, if Samara understands him correctly, complimenting Jack on the power of her biotic shockwave.

“It’s great the way they just fly all over the place,” he enthuses, with an illustrative gesture that ends in a mime of firing a shotgun. “Makes it more of a challenge to shoot ’em.”

“Huh.” Jack pats the space beside her on the cot without looking at Samara and shrugs jerkily, fingers tight on the neck of the bottle. _Come closer_ , her body languages says, _but let’s not talk about it_. “Thanks for setting the bastards on fire, I guess. It’s fun when they scream.”

“Ha!” Grunt shouts, slamming his armored fists together gleefully. “You’d make a good Krogan.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. In case saving the galaxy doesn’t end up being my style.” She tilts her head back, eyes off to the side, still not quite looking at Samara. “Want some?”

Oh, it seems she does. “I confess, I’m curious. I haven’t had a drink in quite some time.”

“The tank didn’t have any imprints on liquor,” says Grunt as Jack hands over the bottle. “I like it!”

“I was always more for drugs myself. But I take what I can get.”

“Drugs? What kind?”

“Went for the ones that make everything shut up. But I got strung out on all kinds of shit.”

Grunt has a particular rumbling frown, uniquely Krogan. “The tank would call it a weakness.”

“Fuck you too,” says Jack, slapping his armored head with a startling hint of affection.

It seems as good a time as any to drink. The particular brand Shepard purchased is strong and cheaply made, something crafted for off-world tourists who won’t be able to notice its flaws. Still, the burn on her tongue lightens Samara’s heart. It reminds her of home, and the years of her youth, and she steadily swallows more of it than she probably should.

“Well, shit,” says Jack when Samara’s finished. “I’m kind of impressed. Maybe take a break and let it hit you.”

“Perhaps,” she admits, and her mouth feels odd around the word, the fading too-strong blaze of the alcohol and sweet aftertaste of its floral components lingering. Jack twists away to give Grunt his turn with the _iralai_ , her spine a hard pale curve, inked black, lit red.

“Jack,” Samara starts before she means to. “May I ask you a question?”

“Sure, what,” says Jack, the stiffness of the words themselves a warning.

“What is the meaning of this symbol?” She doesn’t touch, does not allow herself the privilege, but Jack sees the wide arc of her hand and seems to know which one she means.

“Oh, the omega? That one’s for the cult. You know, end of the universe, all that shit. ‘ _Embrace the death of all that exists to purge yourself of doubt and find true peace_.’” She speaks the words with the tongue of another, a familiar routine of imitation; then scoffs. “Whatever. Bunch of losers looking to be told there was a way out. Nobody embraced death quite like me.”

“What does that even mean?” asks Grunt, evidently unimpressed.

“Drugs mostly. Morbid shit. A bunch of fucking rules.”

“Doesn’t sound that great.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t. So I left.”

True to his name, he grunts, displeased. “Don’t see why you’d join in the first place.”

“You’re, what? Two months old? Give it some time.” Jack grins and takes a long swig from the bottle, the line of her throat dimly lit and beautiful. “How ’bout you, Samara?”

“Me?” She finds herself startled to be addressed, for no reason she can name.

“Did you always wanna be a big spooky justicar, scaring the piss outta cops?”

“No. Asari rarely choose only one path, with lives that can span a thousand years. And for centuries, I enjoyed my work as a mercenary. It provided excitement, and variety, both of which I considered essential. Being a justicar requires a singularity of purpose that I lacked.”

“So how’d you find it?” Grunt asks, with more interest than she’d expected from him.

Samara hesitates, and in that moment she remembers teaching her daughters how to read, tracing each word with her fingertips as the girls sounded them out. She remembers the look of horror, the ill-concealed disgust, in the eyes of her mate when they learned what Samara’s children were doomed to become. She remembers losing Morinth, a mere forty years after she was born, a bright-eyed and brilliant girl who looked so much like Samara, down to the rare freckled pigment of their skin. She remembers standing alone, feeling empty down to her very bones, in the house she’d meant to share with her family.

“I suppose, in the end,” she tells them softly, “nothing else remained.”

 

\--


End file.
